I Used to Think about You All the Time
Notes on Yo La Tengo, Lambchop
The leaves of the maple trees outside my office window are turning yellow and red. When the sun sets, I’ll pull on my Ermenegildo Zegna sweater, walk to the pub, order a Heineken, and watch game one of the World Series, Dodgers and Yankees.
Maple leaves and sweaters and green bottle beers and baseball and nostalgia and the band Yo La Tengo—it’s autumn again in America.
My high school story with Cheri was like the plot of an indie movie with a killer soundtrack. I was the shaggy-haired bashful boy with a troubled home life. She was the wild and free manic pixie dream girl.
Act One: Jeremy signs up for theatre class to try to overcome his shyness. Cheri takes him under her wing, and they become inseparable best friends. He’s jealous of her (older) boyfriend; she’s possessive and keeps Jeremy away from other girls. She tells her parents that he’s gay so he can sleep over at her house. Her bedroom is like a fairy’s chamber. She dresses him in her clothes. They burn Nag Champa and listen to Yo La Tengo and the Pixies, watch Donnie Darko and Almost Famous. She and her boyfriend break up (he cheated). Cheri and Jeremy walk the train tracks at midnight, smoking clove cigarettes. At the end of the year, Jeremy plays the lead in the class’s production of Hamlet. He’s broken out of his shell.
Act Two: Cheri’s accepted into art school, and she splits for Winston-Salem. Jeremy’s mom’s in the psych hospital after a suicidal episode. Jeremy finds solace with the bad kids, getting drunk on forty-ounce beers. Cheri calls to tell him about kissing girls and tripping magic mushrooms. Jeremy has a crush on an overachiever named Emily. She kisses him in the park after school. Then she breaks his heart and returns to her boyfriend Thomas, a football player. Cheri and Jeremy reunite at Christmas and exchange gifts. A mix CD of all their special songs. A painting she made of the nightingale and the rose, the rose’s thorn piercing the heart of the lovesick nightingale.
Act Three: Jeremy’s getting wasted every night, and his beloved English teacher tells him he might not graduate. Cheri’s disillusioned with her art school life. She comes home! They’re inseparable again. Now she has her driver’s license, and they skip school and drive to Asheville. Cheri slides the mix Jeremy made into the CD player.
Music Cue: “Autumn Sweater” by Yo La Tengo.
We could slip away
Wouldn’t that be better?
Me with nothing to say
You in your autumn sweater
Montage: Drag queens strut down Lexington Avenue; our heroes try on vintage clothes at Honeypot; listen to records at Green Eggs and Jam; share a tofu and avocado sandwich with sweet potato fries at Rosetta’s Kitchen.
Cheri meets a boy and ditches Jeremy at a bowling alley. They have a big fight. He’s tired of being her pet. Jeremy gets into Zen Buddhism, shaves off his long hair, and practices nonattachment. Cheri’s conservative parents read her diary and learn that she’s having sex and taking drugs. They send her to a scared straight program and ground her for the rest of the year. She sneaks out late at night and meets Jeremy at Jump Off Rock where they make up, share a clove cigarette, and pinky promise to always be friends.
Dénouement: Jeremy’s moved to Asheville and started college. His creative writing teacher tells him that he has talent. Cheri’s in Asheville, too, waitressing at Jerusalem Garden and renting a room in a large house downtown with a cast of bohemians. They reconnect at the Orange Peel for the Yo La Tengo show.
Music Cue: “Sugarcube” by Yo La Tengo.
Whatever you want from me
Is what I want to do for you
Sweeter than a drop of blood
From a sugarcube
It was autumn 2004. Yo La Tengo were on the so-called “Swing State Tour,” rocking the vote for John Kerry. David Kilgour joined the band. They rocked the Orange Peel for over three hours that night, played thirty-one songs, including “Season of the Shark,” “Today is the Day,” “Deeper into Movies,” “We’re an American Band,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” “Little Eyes,” “Sugarcube,” and “Autumn Sweater.” They covered George Harrison, Simon and Garfunkel, Devo, The Beach Boys, and closed the night with Georgia singing Sandy Denny’s “By the Time it Gets Dark.”
Cheri and I loitered on the floor after the show and were soon joined by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, drinking a well-deserved beer, his baggy blue striped shirt soaked with sweat. I asked about David Kilgour, and he told me that I needed to check out the band The Clean. Ira asked if I believed North Carolina would vote blue.
“Not a chance.”
“I thought, with Edwards on the ticket—"
“No one in North Carolina likes John Edwards.”
Georgia Hubley came over wearing a button down with rolled up sleeves and looking like the coolest mom at a PTA meeting. Her aura was as soft as talcum powder, and her tired smile brightened the room. I asked her for a hug, and she permitted it.
Maggie loved Yo La Tengo, too. There are so many Yo La Tengo songs that I’ll always associate with her—the gentle ones, the Georgia songs, the love songs. “Little Eyes” and “Season of the Shark.” “You Can Have it All.” “By the Time it Gets Dark.” Most of all, “Nowhere Near” from the album Painful, the most autumnal of all the Yo La Tengo records, and the one we played the most early in our romance, when we were making love and drifting to sleep, first in the twin bed in my dorm room, then on the mattress we kept on the living room floor of our apartment, the breeze from a small bedside fan kissing our skin.
Serendipitously, Yo La Tengo played at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville on the evening of our second anniversary. We booked a room at an old-fashioned bed and breakfast. Because we were the only guests, we were upgraded to the honeymoon suite. A hot tub, rose petals on the bed.
Lambchop opened the show, and the performance inspired my enduring affection for Kurt Wagner’s orchestral country collective.
How I Quit Smoking (1996) is an exercise in restraint. The lyric book reads like a collection of elusive modernist poems. In “Life’s Little Tragedy,” Wagner confesses “I don’t speak well, I mumble.” True enough, he never raises his voice, and it requires close attention to decipher his ramblings about “psychotic erections,” “overweight Garth Brooks,” and “a piece of grit in my eye.” Such attention is rewarded, but when played in the background, the music’s slumbrous atmosphere makes for a top shelf tranquilizer. The album became another chariot that carried Maggie and me to sleep.
The best song on the record is track four, “We Never Argue.”
We never argue
Because we’re never in the same place
When you’re holding someone in your arms, and she’s off in her private dreams, you’re both together and far away.
As a surprise for Maggie, I’d emailed Ira to request our song. During the show, he congratulated us on our milestone and summoned Georgia from her drum set to play keys and sing “Nowhere Near.”
Everyone is here
But you’re nowhere near
“We Never Argue” and “Nowhere Near” are entwined in my mind. Two songs with messages addressed to distant lovers.
Back in the honeymoon suite, we undressed too shyly in the lamplight. We slipped too quietly into the steamy water. We were already becoming strangers to each other.
Elio Chacón was a Venezuelan baseball player who played for the Mets in 1962. That season he found himself repeatedly colliding with his teammate Richie Ashburn as the two chased after the same fly balls. Ashburn would yell, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” but Chacón spoke only Spanish and wouldn’t get out of the way. So Ashburn learned to yell “Yo La Tengo!”—Spanish for “I have it!”—and the teammates no longer collided.
Ira and Georgia were shy, arty twentysomethings when they met each other at a Feelies show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. They bonded over weekly softball games and shared devotion to the American rock and roll underground, everything from NRBQ to Mission of Burma. Ira had a Stratocaster, and Georgia had a drum set, so they began making music together, although they could barely play their instruments.
They played their first show as Yo La Tengo in December 1984 at Maxwell’s, sharing the bill with Louisville rockers Antietam.
The name Yo La Tengo would be butchered countless times on flyers and posters and radio broadcasts and venue marquees. Yola Tengo; Wo La Tengo; Yo La Tango; Ya Lo Tango; Yo Le Tengo; Yo Le Tango; Yo Lo Tengo.
Yo La Tengo went through fourteen bassists. They toured endlessly. Sometimes they played at weddings, including their own. They improved. Georgia grew brave enough to sing, and her voice was angelic and melancholy. Ira developed his voice on the guitar, and his abstract noise jams delighted and frustrated audiences across America, Europe, and Japan.
They made some pretty good records, and then a great record—Fakebook (1990)—that was three-quarters covers.
They met their musical soul mate James McNew, and the quixotic search for a permanent bassist was over. The trio made four bona fide indie rock classics in a row—Painful (1993); Electr-0-Pura (1995); I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One (1997); And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (2000).
In 2006, on a hot summer Sunday in Chicago, I was in Union Park, at the inaugural Pitchfork Music Festival. Yo La Tengo were playing that afternoon, and I expected a festival-friendly set. Some of their better-known songs—“Sugarcube,” “Autumn Sweater,” “Tom Courtenay”; a couple of covers; an obscurity for the heads; a noisy freakout closer—“Blue Line Swinger,” if we were lucky.
Instead, they opened with a song none of us had heard, a shimmery rocker about fighting a stranger on a train (“I Should Have Known Better”). Then another unknown song. James introduced an obstinate bassline—Bum-BUM-Bum-BUM-Bum-BUM-Bum-BUM—and locked into it for over ten minutes while Ira performed spastic gymnastics and coaxed and strangled feedback-drenched noise out of his guitar and stack of amplifiers (“Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind”).
To my disbelief, the entire set consisted of then-unreleased songs. The heroic closer built forever. Ira swayed; he stomped on a pedal and added more texture; he looked to the sky; he muttered some mangled phrases about staring too long at the sun; he held the guitar at his knees and hammered the strings; he bent and straightened his body like a rhythmic dipping bird; he picked, clawed, raked, beat the strings; he lifted and shook the guitar; he screamed cryptic threats about tearing the playhouse down; he stomped another pedal and added more distortion; he convulsed like a vertical epileptic; he shook the guitar like he was trying to get a coin out of it; he leaped into the air and slashed the strings as he fell; he sped it up; it got louder; he held the guitar aloft and then slammed it against his thighs; held the guitar aloft and slammed it against his thighs; held the guitar aloft, slammed it against his thighs (“The Story of Yo La Tango”).
Feedback still ringing, the band left the stage without ever having said a word to the crowd.
When Marilena and I lived in a cheap apartment in seedy far east Portland, we were poor but happy. I was finishing grad school, and she had a job with a scammy fundraising operation. We paid for our groceries with an EBT card. Any money we managed to save we put toward concert tickets and drugs.
On the weekend of my twenty-fifth birthday, we celebrated with a gram of MDMA and a Yo La Tengo show at the Wonder Ballroom.
I picked her up from work in my little Honda, and we traded finger dips in the car before shrugging into our raincoats and joining the line outside the ballroom.
It was the so-called “Spin the Wheel” tour. A giant spin-wheel was rolled onto the stage and a volunteer called up to give it a spin. Whatever the arrow landed on would determine the nature of the first set. The possibilities included “Songs that begin with S,” “Dump” (the name of James’s solo project), “Spinner’s Choice,” and “Sitcom Theater” (It was rumored that they’d reenacted an entire Seinfeld episode at a show in Chicago).
The arrow landed on “Sounds of the Sounds of Science.” A chorus of groans reverberated through the building. The hourlong instrumental soundtrack to a marine life documentary made by an obscure French surrealist? Come on—We want rock and roll!
We should’ve known better because: The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is amazing.
I closed my eyes, and Yo La Tengo painted my imagination.
Lipless shanty / Wishful
Silvery hisses / Coral dirge
Droning fluorescence / Smear of squid
Gooey neon orange funk plasma
Squiggly tendrils of emerald algae
Bones of light sizzling underneath
Invisible mucous integument
Hoping bubbles of papaya egg-silk
In a butterflyfish garden / Woozy
Ululating translucent ocean tulips
Murmurs of Aegean hymn
Traces of beluga lullaby
Sudden revelation of forbidden
Electric cave city / The blossoming
Insanity of a starburst anemone
I opened my eyes, and—second set—Yo La Tengo swaddled me in noisy euphoria and delivered me home.
“Mr. Tough”/ “False Alarm”/ “Stockholm Syndrome”/ “Avalon”/ “Tears are in your Eyes”/ “Double Dare”/ “Nothing to Hide”/ “Sugarcube”/ “Blue Line Swinger”
We got high until sunrise. In our messy apartment drinking cheap white wine. I picked up the Sony Handycam and trained it on Marilena who was wearing a fleece blanket like a cape, honey-kissed hair in her face. Her lapis lazuli eyes found the camera, and she said, “I love feeling the way I feel today.”
We tried so hard.
Ten years later, I spent the entire month of June alone in a mansion in the southwest hills of Portland caring for three chihuahuas and two cats that belonged to a filmmaker and his painter wife. The filmmaker and painter had stocked the refrigerator and pantry with lavish foods and the basement refrigerator with beer and cider. I had little reason to take a bus into town or interact with any people. The pets were sweethearts. We enjoyed our dewy morning walks in Council Crest Park with its views all the way to Mount Hood. I had all afternoon to read and write, all evening to cook and sip beer and watch the NBA playoffs.
I was half out of my mind with boredom.
Because of Covid, I hadn’t seen any concerts in a year and a half. But, finally, venues were reopening, and bands were scheduling tours. Yo La Tengo announced a two-night stop in Portland at the Wonder Ballroom.
I was on my laptop at the kitchen table, snacking on garlic-stuffed olives, Chihuahuas napping in a pile at my feet. After buying pairs of tickets for both nights of Yo La Tengo, I signed up for a Bumble account and wrote in my profile: “Need a date for the Yo La Tengo show.”
I caught two fish.
I met Yulia first, at a picnic table in Lents Park. She wore a white sundress printed with yellow maple leaves. The late afternoon sun made her long auburn hair glow. She was born in Odesa and raised in San Francisco and a trace of Ukrainian accented her quiet, patient speech.
She wasn’t familiar with Yo La Tengo. (She assumed they were some sort of mariachi band.) She’d matched with me because she thought my hair was pretty. She liked emo music and named some bands that I didn’t recognize which perplexed her.
“I thought you were a sad boy.”
“I’m country music sad, not emo sad.”
That seemed to hurt her feelings, but she agreed to see Yo La Tengo with me anyway.
Caitlyn wore a stylish lavender shirt. She had red hair and freckles and sad eyes and said she was twenty-nine but looked younger. We met at Slingshot Lounge, but she forgot her ID, and the bartender wouldn’t serve her. So we went to my house and drank beer in folding chairs in the backyard.
She loved Yo La Tengo. She was an indie girl through and through. Her favorite band was Beat Happening. She designed clothes and read Emil Cioran.
She was easy to talk to, and that first afternoon we talked for hours. She told me about nursing her mother while she died of cancer in Philadelphia.
I went to Devil’s Point to nurse a couple of beers and chat with the dancers before meeting Caitlyn at Wonder Ballroom. I was friendly with some of the girls. They were excited to hear that I had a date.
But then Caitlyn texted me. She was sorry, but she was too anxious to be around people that night.
So I ate the extra ticket and flew solo. It was an eighteen and up show, and the ballroom was divided into two sections, the drinking section and the underage section. Once you showed your ID and received your bracelet, you had to stay in the drinking section. The problem with the setup—we were all adults, and we all wanted to drink. Ninety percent of the crowd penned into fifty percent of the space. We were on top of each other. After being cooped inside for two years, the Portlanders were out-of-control obnoxious.
Yo La Tengo started the show with a quiet, mostly acoustic set, and I couldn’t hear the music over the drunks shouting all around me. I spent most of that first set outside smoking cigarettes and feeling rotten.
Over the course of the long evening, the crowd gradually thinned, and toward the middle of the loud, plugged-in second set, I finally found a good place to stand. The band played the squalling “Artificial Heart.” It was an old punky deep cut, only found on the rarities compilation Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo (1996). Guitar feedback is a drug, and that’s when I started getting high.
The following night, I had a better strategy. Yulia and I didn’t bother with drinking bracelets. We stayed on the sober side and parked ourselves close to the stage with plenty of elbow space.
Early treats from the quiet set included “Season of the Shark” and a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Over You.” When they played “Nowhere Near,” I had to blink away a flash of tears. I was aware of Yulia swaying patiently beside me, her sweater brushing mine. I reached down and held her hand. She had no way of knowing how much I was missing other girls.
The loud set was nothing but killers: “Cherry Chapstick” / “Here to Fall” / “Evanescent Psychic Pez Drop” / “Stockholm Syndrome” / “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” / “From a Motel 6” / “Today is the Day” / “Shaker” / “Tom Courtenay” / and their cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” with an extended noise outro.
Outside, Yulia asked a stranger to take our photo with her phone, and we posed beneath the marquee.
She told me she liked the softer songs, the Georgia songs. She didn’t much care for the crazy, noisy ones. She’d had a nice time. She thanked me for taking her.
I touched her arm, and she tilted her face, waiting, but I hesitated, and the moment passed.
I only saw Caitlyn once more. She called me one morning and asked if I wanted to ride along to the Oregon coast. This time there wasn’t much talking. I was hungover, and she was depressed. We drove the winding highway through misty rain listening to The Clean and Tall Dwarfs.
The nervy ocean slammed its waves against the cliffs. We crept to a sea stack, rain soaking our sweaters, and sat close to each other. I blocked the wind with my body while Caitlyn rolled a joint. We smoked until the paper was too wet to pull. The fog billowed. The surf churned. Our thoughts were out of tune. Out of tune.
On a hundred-degree summer afternoon in Birmingham, Sam and I wasted time at The Nick, a dirty little punk bar, nursing PBRs and flirting with the bartender who wore a Daikaiju shirt. The metal door that led to a smoking alley had a message scrawled in Sharpie: “Don’t open. Dead inside.”
Sam is my most reliable show buddy. Over eighteen years of friendship, we’ve seen noisy guitar bands together in at least nine different states. Sonic Youth, Spiritualized, Built to Spill, Acid Mothers Temple, Oneida, Dead Meadow, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and My Bloody Valentine, just to name a few. We’ve probably seen Yo La Tengo together five or six times. The first show we ever saw together might’ve been Yo La Tengo at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, February ‘07.
Sam’s a Braves fan, so we moved to another bar, ate sandwiches, and watched Ronald Acuña Jr. homer twice to lead the good guys to a 6-2 victory over the Twins.
The Saturn is a smallish space-themed club owned by Brian Teasley of Man or Astro-Man? and The Polyphonic Spree. It has a stellar sound system. It’s one of the best places to see live music in America.
It wasn’t a big crowd. Fleet Foxes were playing that night at Avondale Brewing, dividing the Birmingham indie rock scene. Sam and I staked out a spot close to Ira’s side of the stage.
Yo La Tengo’s first set largely drew from that year’s energetic release This Stupid World. The band sounded great, but I had difficulty losing myself to the music. My skeleton ached. This was happening more and more. The pain from my scoliotic spine and arthritic joints was killing the joy of seeing music.
Between sets, I limped to the bar to fetch a round of beers.
I ran right into Cheri.
“You made it!”
We threw our arms around each other. She’d come from Fleet Foxes. In typical manic pixie dream girl fashion, she’d gotten tickets for both of that night’s shows.
I rallied. Yo La Tengo opened the second set with “This Stupid World”—This stupid world is killing me/ This stupid world is all we have—into “Stockholm Syndrome.” On lead vocals, James insisted, “I do believe in love!” and Ira attacked his guitar solo as if his faith in love depended on it.
Then, Georgia’s pitter patter drum, then James’s shaker, then Ira’s organ—Yo La Tengo were playing “Autumn Sweater,” my friends were by my side, and the pain was pushed away.
When they returned for the encore, Ira solicited requests from the crowd. I shouted out for “Damage,” from I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One. It’s one of the band’s loveliest songs, a dreamy tone poem that evokes nostalgia with inchoate guitar feedback, Ira mumbling “I feel like a kid again,” Georgia’s wordless ah-ah-ah-ahs floating over the mix like campfire smoke.
Ira looked at me and said, “I heard you call out for ‘Damage.’” Thanks for the request. We haven’t played it in forever, and I think we’d mess it up. Is there something else we can do for you?”
“’I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,’” I said.
I’m not sure why I picked that one. I knew the band could play it. They’d covered it on Stuff Like That There (2015). I guess I wanted to hear Georgia sing a country song, and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is the best country song.
Later that summer, I ducked into Minglewood, a bar in downtown Lexington. The TV behind the bar was playing a live feed from Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I watched jellyfish squiggle across the screen while the bartender found me a drink menu.
Some of the specialty cocktails were named after bands, and there was a drink called Yo La Tengo. Red wine sangria, Kraken dark rum, lavender and cranberry syrups, fresh orange, lemon and lime juice.
Grinning, I took a photo of the menu and texted it to Cheri.
She texted right back: “Crazy. You won’t believe what I found today in a Pensacola thrift store.”
She texted me a photo of a Yo La Tengo T-shirt from the I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One tour.
I texted: “Does it fit?”
She replied: “It’s your size. You’ll have to visit again to get it.”
I ordered a Yo La Tengo cocktail and tried to imagine how a twenty-seven-year-old Yo La Tengo tour shirt wound up in a Pensacola thrift store. It was obviously a fan’s prized possession, and it was valuable. Authentic vintage tour shirts were all the rage, and a Yo La Tengo shirt from 1996 was rare.
The shirt’s owner would have to be in his fifties or early sixties. Maybe he plays a little guitar on the weekend, follows his favorite baseball team, likes to smoke pot in the basement and watch old episodes of SNL, the Norm MacDonald years.
Maybe he’s going through a separation, a bitter one. He’s sleeping at a Red Roof Inn. His vindictive wife boxes up all his favorite things—his well-oiled baseball glove, his Super Nintendo games, his Punk Planet magazines, that damned Yo La Tengo shirt—and drops the box at Goodwill.
Maybe he still catches Yo La Tengo shows once in a blue moon, when the band comes to the Gulf. He brings his daughter now. She likes those old indie bands, or she pretends to because she likes spending time with him.
They’ll make a road trip out of it. They’ll drive to New Orleans to see Yo La Tengo at Tipitina’s. He’ll dust off his Converse All-Stars and the Heart Beating as One shirt. He’ll get some approving comments from the old heads in the beer line.
In the car, she’ll say, “Dad, play the song about the sweater. I like that one.”
Or it’s worse. The divorce happened ten years ago, and he never moved on. His daughter rarely visits anymore. She can’t stand to see him like this. Since his mom passed away this spring, he can’t keep it together anymore. He spends his final months drinking himself to death in a Pensacola dive bar.
There isn’t much in his closet. Some old shirts. The landlord stuffs them in a Hefty bag. He’ll drop them at Goodwill this afternoon. He’s glad that the geezer kicked it. Finally, he can fix up the place and raise the rent.